Usability Study of Museum Website Based on Analytic Hierarchy Process: A Case of Foshan Museum Website

Abstract

With the development of communication technology and network, museum websites have become an important way for people to appreciate cultural relics and understand the urban culture. The museum website is the forerunner of the physical museum, and the usability of the website greatly affects the user’s experience. To systematically study the influencing factors of museum website usability, this paper used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to construct a museum website usability evaluation system, and took the Foshan Museum website as the research object, using the classic usability testing method to evaluate the website usability, collected objective performance indicators, behavioral data, and subjective evaluations of participants. A total of 10 university graduate students participated in this experiment. The experimental results showed that the current website of Foshan Museum had problems such as confusion of information structure and lack of key information. The hierarchical structure of the website was optimized using the Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) method. Finally, the usability test was repeated, and the improvement of the website usability was verified through data analysis. This study also draws some general conclusions, which provide some reference value for the same type of website optimization in the future.